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How is the Market Trading Infrastructure Holding Up?

Thursday, January 24, 2008 | 08:30 AM

Throughout yesterday, I heard numerous reports of traders unable to get through to their brokers / clearing firms.

In particular, Fidelity was supposedly down until almost noon on Tuesday, and TD Ameritrade website crashed and its servers were down.

Anyone else run into these (or related) issues?

~~~

I see Reuters has the story:

TD Ameritrade online trading system hit by outage

Online brokerage TD Ameritrade Holding Corp was hit on Tuesday by an outage in its Web-based trading system, but it was resolved shortly after noon, the company said.

Ameritrade said customers experiencing problems logging into accounts over the Internet could still access their accounts through the company's telephone system.

Telephone trades were charged at Web-based rates during the period of the outage, the company said. A TD Ameritrade spokeswoman said the company saw a significant increase in activity through its call center and online about one hour after the market opened, and customers had difficulties logging into their accounts on its Web site.

The problems were resolved by early afternoon, she said.

While I am quick to point out technical errors, let me also say that TD handled this correctly, charging the lower Web-based rates for telephone called trades.

I've done Kudlow with Joe Moglia, and he's a class act. If E*Trade had a "Moglia," they might have avoided some of their woes.